gamescom 2014: Visiting Every Planet in No Man’s Sky Will Take Over Five Billion Years

August 16, 2014
Written by Zarmena Khan

Hello Games co-founder Sean Murray has said that visiting every planet in No Man’s Sky’s procedurally-generated universe will take over five billion years. Yikes! However, the number wasn’t always so vast.

During the early stages of development, Hello Games was using a 32-bit number to generate planets in the in-game universe. Murray says, “With that 32-bit number it would take you four or five thousand years to see every planet if you spent only a second on each one.”

Apparently, this wasn’t enough for Hello Games. Partially owing to the internet community challenging the aforementioned claim, the team decided to go even further than this, and opted for using a 64-bit number, which means 2^64. So if you were to spend one second on each planet, it would take you over five billion years to visit all the planets in the No Man’s Sky universe.